Space-launch company United Launch Alliance delayed the debut flight of its next-generation rocket, Vulcan, by at least a month to early May.
(Bloomberg) — Space-launch company United Launch Alliance delayed the debut flight of its next-generation rocket, Vulcan, by at least a month to early May.
Vulcan will be ready by mid-April but the mission’s main payload, a lunar lander built by Astrobotic Technology, can only launch within short, specific time windows each month, the company said in a press conference Thursday. That means the earliest opportunity will arise on May 4. ULA had previously targeted late March.
The rocket’s second payloads will include test satellites from Amazon.com Inc.’s future megaconstellation Kuiper and memorial payload for Celestis. ULA Chief Executive Officer Tory Bruno said he’s confident he’ll be able to stick to the timeline for Vulcan.
“Obviously, they’re not done until they’re stacked on top of our rocket, but I feel very confident that they will be ready to go,” he said.
United Launch Alliance, a Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. joint venture, has been working on Vulcan for nearly eight years. The Centennial, Colorado-based company is building it to replace its workhorse vehicle, Atlas V, which relies on a Russian-made RD-180 engine.
The Vulcan will allow ULA, one of the primary launch providers for the Department of Defense, to sever ties with a foreign adversary of the US. The Atlas V engine has been a concern since at least 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, and soon after that military action the company said it would create a new rocket powered by an American-made engine.
In 2018, ULA selected the BE-4 engine — designed and manufactured by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC, for use in Vulcan. The same engine will be used in Blue Origin’s future New Glenn rocket, which is designed to launch payloads to Earth’s orbit. To reach orbit, two BE-4 engines will boost Vulcan at its base.
Read More: Bezos’s Rocket Engine Nears Debut, Ending US Reliance on Russia
However, the engine’s development has been marked by years of delays. When Blue Origin and ULA first announced their partnership on the BE-4 in 2014, the companies said they hoped it would be ready for its first flight in 2019. However, Blue Origin didn’t deliver the first flight-ready BE-4s for the Vulcan’s debut launch until late last year.
There is still more testing to be done between now and the launch date, with ULA planning to roll out the rocket to its launchpad in Florida in the upcoming days. There was a short pause in testing as the company investigated some performance variations with the engines, ULA said.
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